


Prompt: One Missed Call

by ScienceOfficerWillowRosenberg (left_handed_moth)



Category: Doctor Who (2005)
Genre: Clara is offscreen, F/F, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-11-26
Updated: 2018-11-26
Packaged: 2019-08-29 13:01:35
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,125
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16744495
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/left_handed_moth/pseuds/ScienceOfficerWillowRosenberg
Summary: The Doctor gets a call from another TARDIS.  She's not sure, but she thinks she knows who it is.  Graham learns a little about the Scottish bloke from before.





	Prompt: One Missed Call

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks to Jenny-Calendar over on tumblr for prompting this. The prompt was 'one missed call,' with any characters I chose. I've been thinking a lot about Graham and Thirteen as a broTP, specifically regarding their both having experienced big loss over the years, which got me rewatching Hell Bent, which got me having feelings.
> 
> I think it probably fits into canon a little later than what we've seen so far; Thirteen hasn't been very forthcoming about her past or herself with team TARDIS so far.

As soon as the Doctor walked into the TARDIS, all three were talking over each other.  Even Graham was excitable.  She couldn’t make out a lick of it.

“You know, talking a mile a minute’s my job,” she said.

They piped down.  Ryan spoke up.  “The phone was ringing.  You’ve got a proper phone in here.  I didn’t think there’d actually be a phone.”

“Honestly, I wasn’t sure she’d include one this time round myself,” said the Doctor, halfway to herself.

“We didn’t pick it up,” said Graham.

“I wanted to,” said Ryan.  “Yaz didn’t.  Thought it might be private.”

“And I just didn’t know what the hell we’d say to whatever sort of person would be calling you,” added Graham.

“Also we couldn’t find it,” finished Yaz.

The Doctor smiled.  “Well of course you couldn’t.  The call was for me, wasn’t it?”

Graham and Ryan looked taken aback, but Yaz seemed to get it.

“Now, not to be rude, but if you could all clear out so I can fuss about with these controls and figure out where my voicemail is, that’d be lovely.”

The three of them did.

*****

There hadn’t been a voicemail.  But the number, well, the designator, was Gallifreyan.  Specifically a code used for other TARDISes.  She knew of exactly one other TARDIS floating about in space, and she wasn’t sure she’d want to call the occupants back.

She’d taken to tinkering with things when she was anxious.  It seems she was right, that first time, when she said she thought she was good at making things.  She’d disassembled a thingie–for lack of a better term–that she’d found squirreled away in Machu Picchu, and its scattered pieces were just as inert and incomprehensible as the whole.  She was trying not to take that as symbolic.

Graham tapped on the side of the entryway.

“I’m busy!” said the Doctor, a little too angrily.  “Well, no, actually, I’m stumped.  So, er…come in?”

He did.  “Who was it?  On the phone, I mean.”

“Dunno.” said the Doctor.

“Well, most of my mystery calls are just companies who think us old people’ll buy anything if they confuse and scare us enough.  Figure you’ve got a lot more years on you than I do, so you’re an even bigger target.”

“Wasn’t that.” said the Doctor, half-smiling.  “I’ve got an idea who it might be, only I thought I’d never see her again.”

Graham looked concerned.  “Was it that wife you’ve mentioned?  The one with the name that sounds a bit flower child?”

“River?  No.  It’s different with her.  I got the goodbye I wanted with her.  There was this other woman.  She traveled with me.”

“Like we do?”

“Yes and no.  More no, I hope.”

“Bad ending, eh?”

“Endings have too many bits to them to just be bad.  But it feels that way sometimes.  She died.  Then I brought her back, and tried to save her.  But I was being selfish, and the person I saved wouldn’t be her any more, so she saved herself.  Cut herself right out of my memory and flew off to be free of me.”  She waited to see which one of the many questions she’d raised Graham would pick to ask.

“You say she cut herself out of your memory?  Then how–”

“I got better.  And now I remember her, and I know she’s out there, and I can quite literally give her all the space she needs, even if it’s a universe’s worth.”

“When was this?”

“Last time round.  When I was the old Scotsman.”

“Afraid I don’t know how recent that is, mate,” said Graham.  He always got a little more masculine with her when she mentioned the men she used to be.  And she could stand to be his mate.  He had enough past to be hers.

“I just got my memories back,” she said.  “Before I crash landed.  I got them all back in a rush, and felt good about it, and I suppose it was part of why I was finally ready to stop being him.”

“Did you love her?”asked Graham.

“I don’t know,” she said.  Which was to say that Graham meant a very specific thing by that, and that that thing may or may not apply, “I thought the world of her, and I thought we could be together forever, in spite of the fact that I know it’s impossible.  And I say that knowing just how much really is possible..”

“Well, to an old-fashioned Earthman, that sounds like you were in love,” said Graham.  “If I’m just being outdated, it still sounds like you had a thing, at least.”

“A thing.”  Normally, inarticulate descriptions of complicated phenomena was the Doctor’s territory.

“Like me and Grace.  I miss her, but our marriage was this separate thing, and it’s not there without her, and I miss that too.”

The Doctor turned the notion around in her head.  “It’s funny, you know, there was a prophecy about that.  There was this big bad thing that they called the Hybrid coming, and no one knew quite what it was, and it turned out it was us.”

“So you had a thing.  It was written in stone that you had a thing.”

“Not stone.  Not exactly matter, really.  But the prophecy was right. Our _thing–”_ she did finger quotes, at which Graham rolled his eyes.  “–was going to destroy the universe.  And me.  And her.”

“But you still miss it, don’t you?” said Graham.

“Where _do_ you get all that emotional intelligence?”

Graham shrugged.  “You get to watch a lot of people, driving a bus.  A man picks up a few things, over the years.”

The Doctor was going to tell him that not everyone could pick those things up, but that sort of reassurance was more for her younger companions.  If they were mates, like he said, then a mate just sort of nodded and implied.

“You know,” she said, “I told her all about it, right after it happened.  Only I didn’t know it was her.  I was just telling my sorrows to a stranger.  That was the last time.”

“And that was him?  The Scottish bloke?”

The Doctor smiled.  It wasn’t that simple, but that was the face Clara was looking at when they last spoke.  So maybe it was him, and not her.

“Thought so.” said Graham.  “Well, I’m not older nor wiser than you, but I’ve got a thought for you to roll around a bit.”

“Oh?”

“She never called _him_ , did she?”

The doctor looked at her hands.  Her hands that didn’t know a guitar any more.  Her hands whose owner she was still in the process of becoming.

She smiled.  “I’ll think on that, thanks.”


End file.
